


that his might could render void (no coward soul)

by speakmefair



Category: Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: AU Fixit, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Bee Crown, Consensual Underage Sex, Cupboard Council, Families of Choice, Historically Not-Underaged Sex, Histories Women Win At Everything, Kate Percy Breaks Bechtel, Lancaster Brothers, Loch Leven, Medieval Surgical Procedures, Multi, My Hand On Your Heart, Plantagenets' A+ Parenting, Really So Much Violence, Shaven Heads, Swimming Is A Metaphor, Team as Family, The King In Scotland, The Peacemaker - Freeform, The Sword Unsheathed, Unmarried Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 11:25:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7506403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Percy's sense of honour and justice wakes up at Flint Castle.  Richard II does indeed go North.  The Lord Aumerle becomes a hero.   And there are two Kings in the Isles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue - July 1439

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for angevin2, who continues to inspire, and christened this utter lunacy 'Scottish Shenanigans' when I explained the plot at 4 am in a bitter January of Barbican love.

**Westminster, England, July 1439**

' _The purpose you undertake is dangerous;'—why, that's_  
_certain: 'tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to ___  
_drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this_  
_nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety._

There are things no-one knows. 

There are things that no other man will ever know.

They do not know that — 

(there are shackles and iron and words which should never have been spoken)

But there are stories which started as legends and became fire-tales, when it is the other way around, for most of the telling. 

(there is a heart that beats under a King's fingers)

No-one does anything but smile, any more, when they hear the old stories of the King in Scotland, blood-garbed —

(and what if I told you he lived?)

The King in Scotland —

the Lord Edward with his broken heart — 

(I'm here, I'm here, you're all right)

Ah, the tales and the legends, and never as fierce as the truth of the then

(the truth of the now)

the Hotspur selling his good roan for two hacking-horses and a gold piece and the Welsh Marches for all love —

(Well God damn and blast Cheshire to hell for their love, for I'll have none)

The Lady Kate, who still holds the Borders by her name, though her body is long gone.

(I shall to my King and remember myself)

These are fire-tales.

But this is truth.

They are all dead now, and there is only the old King in England to remember.

He remembers it all, and sometimes, quiet and a little drunk, he laughs at those who refuse to.

Henry, fifth of that name, old and never fire-drowsing, and keeping the oriflamme of his kingmaking high above his throne; Henry who is spoken of as greater than his great-grandsire, the Great King; Henry who teaches his border-bred son-in law how to defeat a Spider King of France, while all the time, smiling in his beard, he remembers a prince who roused Eastcheap, and was crowned long before his father died and bequeathed him a circlet of gold.

Henry remembers it all. All the things he heard, all the things he has been told since were true. And more than any of it, he remembers all that he then imagined, and gloated over; a dragon's hoard to keep his heart safe and his mind free.

Henry remembers a love that made a kingdom.

And rejoices in what has been made.


	2. Flint Castle, Wales, August 1399

Aumerle, lost and and shore-stranded and heartbroken, cannot take into the closed walls of his heart what is most true. He can only know it.

He has kissed Richard. He never expected much more but his own futile ferocity, to come from that, but Richard responded, and oh, that is worse, that is more than the mere puerile voicing of weak 'no', that is intolerable, because —

—because all he can do is weep, after that kiss is done, and gone, and may be the only warmth he will ever be allowed to take with him of Richard, both King and Man (and oh, how Aumerle knows how he can be both and one and almost a Trinity of his own within his divided soul—)

(the True God from True God, begotten, not made….)

(lumen de lumine)

Oh, let him never stop loving, he thinks, and he kisses back and deep and close, he kisses Richard, the skin of his lips clings to the memory of touch and _holds_ to it. Long after the reality of Richard's lips has gone even into a fading warmth from the scald of desperate belief and into the old longing, passionate and deprived and never-ending, he is still kissing his lover, his cousin. His King. His King, who loves him. 

Oh thou on high, _let him never stop loving!_

Let him never stop loving me.

Never.

Never.

_Live for me, Edward._

He will never change or falter from his promise.

He looks at the Hotspur — he has heard that he was given to Henry as some prize, but emprisoned might be the better term for what has been done — and sees a look of hatred on that proud man's face, sharp and hard and fierce, a man going to war for nothing but winning.

If he were capable of deceiving himself, he might believe that Harry Percy, who was described by his own father as _tender_ , was looking upon Henry Bolingbroke.

But the Border Lord, clutching at his gorget as though he would rip it off in a heartbeat, can only be looking at Richard; can only for all of every possibility be looking at Richard, with that flayed-raw gaze.

Nothing can save Edward's King now.

Nothing.

Henry takes Richard's hands, and smiles, and they are for London — and the Hotspur's hand goes to his sword, brief and flickering, a wild touch of nothingness, and his teeth show — and his lips close, and he smiles.

He smiles like Bolingbroke, small and tight and loathing all humanity.

His eyes burn hatred across the fires.

And it is Edward he looks at, while he smiles.

Dear God, what have they made of the boy they pulled from Scotland, like a half-burned brand from the fire, to save for another date? Another one to smile, and close his lips, and refuse to see or scent the festering of old wounds?

The Hotspur hates, and will to war, clutching at iron.

And Henry will be King.

Henry, who leads Richard off like some prize of war, will be King, now. And the Hotspur stands against the fire, black-and-orange silhouetted, and snarls, and spits.

It is only later, when Edward lies upon camp-bedding and is assured he is safe, that he remembers something.

The light was orange, and the shadows were black, and the Hotspur was part of both.

But the spittle that flew from his mouth was as red as though some man had given him a split lip — or as though he had torn that soft flesh to shreds with his teeth, and bled inwardly.

Edward, who can no longer lie to himself, weeps, quiet and muffled into the thin layer of his coverings.

Harry Percy is become Bolingbroke's sword unsheathed, in blood and sworn promises.

Richard goes to London to die.

And Edward cannot — cannot — cannot —

He cannot bear this knowledge.

 

**

When Harry came back from Scotland, Kate was waiting for him, and they lost no time in solemnising their own vows.

They had no more than a bed to sanctify them, and wanted no more, either, while their bodies repeated what the world refused to see.

They talked. Harry Percy, who stumbled and stuttered over the simplest answer, learned how to phrase a question, for it was easy to do so, when Kate's dark and drowned-blue eyes longed to give him answers.

“What did you imagine when we were young? What you were going to be when you were older?” Harry had asked her one night as they lay in bed. His wrists had still been raw, then, in places. Kate had kept trying to kiss them whole. At the time, he knew that she thought he believed she was joking about it, but she hadn't been, and that much he was always sure of. Because they didn't heal, and that was why she kept kissing them. Six months after he came back, and they had never healed.  
   
“You want the truth?” she had asked him.  
   
Harry had laughed. It had come out as a quiet thing, a whisper on the cusp of sound, but still, it had made Kate look as though he'd hit her. He had never asked her why. “I always want the truth,” he had said, instead of asking. It's the one thing he had remained certain of, in the Douglas's keep. 

Kate, though, as ever, had floored him completely with her reply.  
   
“I wanted to slay a dragon. And then they'd make me a knight.” 

Harry had laughed harder at this and leant up on his elbow to look down at Kate in the dark. She had looked back, and he had stared at the way the pale moon illuminated her skin. Her tiny curved smile. “Kate. I don’t think there’s such a thing as dragons.”  
   
She had hit his arm, and not gently, either. There would be a bruise next day, and he remembers the purple stain of it. “Well. No. I know. It's just. I. I wanted to, I don’t know, be a hero, or maybe a prince. Be the knight.”  
   
He loves her sometimes with such sharpness that he thinks it might sever his veins, and that time had been no exception. “What happened?”  
   
“You know what happened," she had grumbled, but her small smile had been widening.  
   
“And what is that, my Lady Kate?” He had reached out, stroked one lazy finger down the curve of her waist, making her gasp as he gave her what she still loves the most, to be touched, slow and appreciative. He had wanted, then, to stop her talking, but she has been, and is, always better than him, always closer to the target, and he cannot, ever, silence her.  
   
“I’m — better — at _being_ the dragon,” she had rasped out, and pulled Harry's body to hers.

He remembers how he had grinned, quick and savage, down at her wide eyes.

"Are you sure of this?"

"Oh yes," Kate had murmured, and drawn her nails down his back, long and slow and scratching-small. "Feel."

He thinks of that moment at Flint, watching his father. His father says, but with far more words, "Obey," and he does. Not gladly, but he does. All doubts aside, he does. But he does not watch the King, in his moment of terrible reckoning. For some reason he cannot quite grasp, he watches Aumerle's face, he watches something bleak and blank and terrible settle as the King walks away, and all he can hear is Kate's voice.

_Feel._

_Feel._

_Feel._

He looks at the Lord Aumerle, devastated and ruined and still standing tall amidst the lunacy Henry Bolingbroke has set free to rule in the place of two kings and no majesty. He tugs at his gorget, rubs at his neck, where he still feels the bite of Scottish shackling. He chews at the soft insides of his cheeks, ignores the pain until he tastes the salt-sweet of his own blood, and sucks on it. 

And when his King is gone, and the King to be is gone, he spits blood at the fire, and smiles.

And he leans back upon Kate's words, and lets himself feel more than the pain of his tooth-torn mouth.

He feels only betrayal, as his mind rests, and it burns in his gullet, acidly scalding. He spits again, to rid himself of the taste, but he knows it for what it is.

Harry Percy, the Hotspur of the North, will never cleanse his palate with wine or aquavit or clean spring water of what now runs in his blood.

Pure and unadulterated cowardice.

**

Flint Castle is cold, but Richard never shivered under its clammy chill. He cannot stop himself now, though, taking Henry's hot-dry hand and feeling it, not leech out the cold, but warming his fingers just enough that he becomes aware of how cold, how very very cold, his skin and flesh and even bones are.

He shivers, once, and grits his teeth against it, in case anyone should see, and mistake it for fear. But his clenched teeth try to clash against themselves, and the hard muscles of his arms and chest clamour and tremor under his robes, and his diaphragm hitches, again, and again, as though he suffers from hiccups, or cannot breathe.

The last would be true. Dear God, he is breathing and he cannot breathe, and all of his body shudders; shudders in revulsion; shudders away from what he knows he must do.

Edward's arms had been demanding, but it had never felt like this. It had been warm, that weeping embrace, warm and somehow a comfort; Edward's tears had been cool when they soaked through his garments, and his breath had been warm, not arid and burning and ungiving.

Edward's lips had been warm. His lips, and his breath, and his hands. Warm and yielding and forgiving. 

Richard breathes in, hard and long, and thinks on that warmth, and his shoulders lower as he thinks of Edward's undemanding, impossible, unlooked-for love. He thinks of his arm around those heavy, tired shoulders, thinks of holding Edward together with nothing but the fierce and unconditional love that sprung, quite unwanted, from his soul and his heart; thinks of Edward turning to him, in the midst of his own despair, as a saviour, and feels warmth.

It glows in him, heats him, transforms his body if not his spirit, and the smile he turns to Henry is softened through by a memory of safety given.

Richard is not afraid of anything. 

Whatever comes next, whatever the promise he dragged from Edward brings forth in its bearing out, he has been warm and given warmth, and poor Henry, poor tragic beleaguered Henry, who cannot give or receive either, Henry knits his brows and stares at him and does not understand.

Henry takes and gives nothing but the false cold strength of a crown, and will never know, now, how it feels to be loved so deeply and so greatly that it creates melting, cooling, salt water.

He will never know what it feels like, to be the weaker and to be stronger for it.

Richard smiles before he is aware that is how his realisation will evince itself.

"Oh, my poor cousin," he says gently, and lifts Henry's hand, and kisses it. "God save you."

**


	3. As Once

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kate and Hotspur are actually having a better time than Aumerle.

**_As. ye. ar. nou_  
**_So. onc. vas._** **

Kate has always, slightly, despised her cousin Edward for wearing his too-sentimental heart blazoned in his eyes. She knows their look, for, if she did not guard, they would be hers. But when she sees the same sick burning of _noli mi tangiere_ that she has always, so very carefully, kept in her arsenal of expressions to use as needed; when she sees it set into her Harry’s visage, she does as his white, clamped-close mouth asks, and steps back. Dear God, _what happened at Flint?_

Harry went to Bolingbroke out of love. Out of admiration. Out of a desire to thank the man who saved him. 

He went for gratitude.

He went for a kneeling. He went to laugh for all delight. He went to clasp hands, and —

And —

 _Harry!_ her heart cries, and still, even though she knows he hears the crying-out of her pained love, he will not meet her eyes.

He has come back, oh yes, but he has come back with a sickened, startled hate. And her cousin Aumerle and her husband-to be do not speak, and yet they tell her with a turn of their heads that they may not talk to her, but they do not talk to each other, either.

And Harry’s eyes do not leave Edward, and Edward’s eyes do not leave Richard, and dear God in Christ, _Henry, my Gaunt-son cousin, what did you do to them?_ What did you do to them, so that they who have no reason but my desire for one and pity for the other should hold that look between them in body and soul when they cannot even meet one other's glancing and horrified look?

Harry’s eyes meet hers for the first time, even as she thinks that, and his mouth twists and snarls as it did after Scotland; it twists as it used to after the brack-water and the forgetting and the weeping stones of the Old Douglas's walls; and he is telling her with his his bitten mouth and wounded eyes to _keep away, keep away_ : the curl of his upper lip speaks of grief, of something Kate does not know, and she runs for the stables; she runs for Harry’s roan and the sweet smell of hay and love and safety, and she collides with iron and steel and sweat and love and grasps Harry’s face in her hands. 

“Oh God,” she manages. “What —“

“He said he came for Lancaster,” Harry mourns, and she cards out his war-plait, kisses his face. She knows there is nothing she can do for him, not with that black look of having witnessed rotting; not with the sad destruction of something one held dear on his face. She has seen it before. But this one time, she fears what the joy of their bodies might not be able to be able to give; not as they could and did heal one another after the hell that was the keep of the Old Douglas. It will never cure or save or hold tight with delighted, salt-rimed laughter; not with teeth and hands and tongues and all-giving bodies. "My God, but he said he came for Lancaster, Kate. And I — believed him.” 

She cradles his face, full of love, not pity, though she supposes she should feel the latter; and she kisses his eyes, and his mouth, and his temples, and his mouth, his mouth, his mouth, until at last he sobs, once. 

Once, and hard, against her mouth, and then he weeps silently.

And at that sound, her heart sends pain into her head and eyes as it shivers and beats too fast under his words. “Lord God, I am betrayed! He said he came for Lancaster, Kate, and I _believed him because he saved me!_ And I have wronged our King, and I have wronged — I am wrong, I am wrong, oh, my Kate, I have taken gold for truth, and I am wrong…oh, by my saint, I have done wrong…”

“Harry,” she whispers into his ear, “Harry mine, what will you for atonement?”

And he raises his wet face from her neck, and the bleak snarl is back. “I shall apologise to your cousin,” he spits, and she is left unknowing which one he can possibly mean.

**

Harry has only known one thing, in the last three years. That the King cares nothing for him. 

That Henry Bolingbroke, whom he had never as yet met, before that day of acknowledgement, once bought him freedom. 

It is one thing. 

One thing. 

One thing. 

The same knowledge. 

And to meet Bolingbroke, to have the prize of thanking him — he has longed for it. But at Flint. 

At Flint. 

At Flint. 

The blank amusement at his father’s description of him. 

Both of them, Bolingbroke and his father Northumberland, laughing blankly, as he confessed they had never met before that moment. The nothingness in Bolingbroke’s eyes. 

And the look in Kate’s discarded and unwanted and unneeded cousin’s eyes, as the Lord Aumerle looked on the King, and Harry’s hand tried to find some weapon to defend against treason — oh, God! those eyes, that drowned look of longing that he could not mistake — could never mistake — and Bolingbroke’s smile — _and this is hell!_ — well, perhaps, perhaps it is, perhaps it is hell. But they do not, cannot know it for an iron-and stone-truth. 

They cannot know what Harry Percy knows and what his King will soon know.

How despair had been Scotland and despair is Flint and despair is what lies in what Harry the Hotspur has done.

How he was chained, and shacked, and collared, and forgotten.

How Henry Bolingbroke remembered him. 

How Richard his King forgot him.

It's truth.

So why does he weep now, away from his Kate, and seeing the Lord Edward's eyes, and driving his face against a stable rafter?

_Ys wnce I wys…._

Harry Percy cries out, and drives his fist against wood.

"No! No! No!"

_So sill tho bee_

"NO!" Harry roars to old wood and scattered hay and shale, and refuses to weep, even while stinging, painful, thick water burns out his eyes for pure loathing of his own self. 

"No," he whispers to a God he is no longer sure exists. "No."

And he husks and rasps out one word to the darkening and dusk-smelling stables — "Kate," he half-chokes. Coughs on it, ruins the sweetness of her name. "Kate."


	4. Remember Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kate remembers a time when she was a scared girl called Elizabeth.

Kate cries a lot, at first, while Henry Bolingbroke hovers over a crown that becomes more and more gilded and less of the truth as days pass.

She cries for many reasons.

Not because she is unhappy — well, she is unhappy, but that is hardly the point, but more because remembering seems to create pointless salt water spilling out of her eyes.

She cries because Harry no longer comes to her bed.

She cries because her brother avoids her.

She cries because sometimes the pain of it all simply stings and tears at her, and makes no sense, and spills out and over into lemon-juice rasping salt, and reddens her eyes.

She cries more because Harry no longer comes to her bed to soothe the pain of her swollen eyelids with kisses.

Because he is no longer there in the morning, to plait the dishevelment of her hair, combing it out gently first, and then tie it up in a ribbon, and seal the ends of its knot with a kiss.

 _To keep the night in,_ he always says, a nod to their pretence at respectability.

She has combed her own hair out of its styling now, as was always supposed to be truth; she has done as has been her custom: dismissed her maid and disrobed, and now - she has ended up running the tortoiseshell tines through her own hair; has sat in the ten minutes before midnight more than twelve times. There is no-one to keep her nights in with a kiss of safety. There are no ribbons. There is nothing new to keep the night in and away.

She does not cry for those twelve lonely nights and unwanted false dawns.

She cries because — because she remembers being seven. She cries because she remembers. 

She remembers that summer as it turned into autumn, and the Hunt became imminent. 

She remembers her cousins' visiting, and how it was an honour, and how they all had to be on their best behaviour.

She remembers _running_.

She remembers falling, out of a tree that the boys had never been able to climb, and the Queen Anne, kneeling and anxious, and calling her by the wrong name.

"Katherine? Katherine? Katherine, it is fine, you are a very good little girl, I just want to see if you are hurt, yes?"

She tries to say that it's the wrong name, that she is Elizabeth, but all that comes out is a whimper, and the Queen is crouching down by her, and the Queen is ruining her skirts, and Elizabeth is going to be in so much trouble and —

"Richard!" yells the Queen, and not like his subject, but like her mother shouts, unthinking, for a servant. 'Richard, I need of you!" And then, quieter, "Katherine, Katherine, I think your arm she is broke, can we take you home now please?"

"I want Harry," she whispers.

Harry is safe, and angry, and protects her from her mother. She likes him. And she knows that the Richard the queen is calling for is the King, and the King will tell her mother what she has done, and —

Elizabeth bursts into tears.

"Oh, Katherine," the queen says helplessly, and then everything becomes worse, because the King is down on his knees among all the pine-needles and Elizabeth's stupidity and all his _silk_ , and Elizabeth will be whipped for this, and —

"Katherine, is it?" says the King. "Well, my little Lady Kate, what happened to you, then?"

His sleeves smell nice, and his arms are strong, and Elizabeth stops crying, and whispers into his ear as he lifts her from the ground, "I'm Kate."

"Yes you are," he says, and he lets her snuggle into his neck as he carries her, and she goes to sleep for a little while, and then wakes up because, "Sire, OW!"

"Mmm. Thought so. Not her arm, Anne-love. Knee, I suspect. What hurts, anyway."

"Terrible impossible man, what will you be like when —"

Kate goes back to sleep, but she thinks the King might have been crying.

She knows, later, that it was true, and he was.

It is, strangely, or not so strangely, Harry Percy who runs towards them as they enter. Self-christened and new-born Kate, aware and drowsy at once, registers how her mother and Harry's father break off, and look at the three of them as they come in bearing pine-needles and mud and her own small self; but it is Harry who runs, and stands in front of his King, fierce and determined.

"You'll be lettin' the Lady 'Lisbet go, now," he says, and Kate beams down at him.

"'M Kate, now," she says. "Queen Anne said."

"Then you'll be lettin' my Lady Kate go. Sire. Now, an' it please."

The King and Kate's Queen exchange a look, then, one that she will not decipher until many years later, and then King Richard says, very carefully, "Can you carry her, my boy?"

Harry Percy, all of eleven years, and a sword already buckled to his side, and Kate's brother Mortimer at his back, turns his head away from them all. He thinks, and he bows his head, and Kate knows he has come to an understanding of himself long before he looks their King in the face, and says in a court and clear-crystal, unaccented voice, as chilling as any man or woman in the room, superior though they undoubtedly are to him, "I cannot, Sire."

"Then let me, and you shall choose the physician," says Kate's King and cousin, and Harry bows his head, and steps back and then — and then —

— there is so much noise, and movement —

— and the Queen screams, small and sharp and involuntary, and she is turning, turning, turning, a dizzying haze of coloured sleeves and skirts, and the King is shouting something, and Northumberland is shouting something — and Harry is somehow against the door and lopsidedly pained, and the young Lord of Norwich is crying out, the first time Kate has heard him speak — "Good Christ, Northumberland! —"

And Kate's Queen is white in the face, and not with fear but with anger, and she is between Kate and their King and Harry all at once, and saying with the cold deadliness of the snow Kate has learned to fear —

"You'll speak no more, not today. Or if you do, in the chains."

"My queen." 

Northumberland bows, and steps backward, backward, backward, and Kate clutches at King Richard's shoulder and whispers, "Please. Harry's hurt —"

"Yes," is all the King says, and takes her away, and Kate would not like to be the dread Northumberland now, not faced with the Queen and her indomitable rage and her swept-out skirts covering Harry's broken form from view.

She smiles, and lets her King see, and the King grins down at her.

"Nor I," he murmurs, like a secret. 

Kate giggles, and lets herself be wrapped in perfumed sleeves and broad shoulders and loving arms.

She knows, in that moment, that they are all safe.

She learns later that it is not something Harry nor her brother feel, for Harry, less than a minute later, had slammed his shoulder back into place against the same door-frame his father had thrown him into. She learns that he had said to that same father that he would to war now, and it please the King and God and the Lords of the North; she learns that he had been laughed at, and that —

Disaster had been stopped still-born. Richard and Anne had swept them all up in their returning train, after that, and they were all at court.

All at court, and all at sea, and no-one acknowledging them, and Kate and the boy they had already started to call Hotspur, as he defeated every man on the tilting-grounds; Kate and the Harry who had once stood in front of a King to protect her —

fell in love.

Gently, slowly, inevitably, delightedly, they fell in love.

And then Queen Anne died, and Shene burned, and then Harry was a prisoner of the Douglas, and Kate was left to worry as an unsanctified bride; Kate was left because no-one, no-one cared for what had been said in front of church doors; no-one cared for what had been witnessed by a then-flagrantly uncaring King (a now dethroned and unsanctified one, and Kate cares nothing for that, either).

Richard, Kate knows, saw them when they made their vows in front of the church doors, at the holy-hour of the soul's dark valley, 

_Him who boasts, let him boast in the Lord…_

His promise to her, her promise to him.

_Nothing but you._

Richard had been unobtrusive, unkinglike, unlike himself, but he had been there. He had watched as Harry’s ring was placed on her too-small finger, and he had watched as they both laughed, and a clasp was promised. 

Richard, her cousin and her King, had seen this, even though he had ignored their requests for a ceremony then, he had _seen it_. 

Kate still believes he would have sanctified it.

And now, now, Henry has become and made himself heir to all King Richard knew and knows. 

_So why?_

Why, when he knows the truth? He is the King, then why should he not acknowledge the truth?

Kate asks this to God, to a void, to anything, and receives no answer. Why in the name of the dear Christ and in the name of all the sacrosanct chattels of the church — of which the law has proclaimed she belongs to, after the giving and receiving of silver and gold (and Harry carries her new-minted coin sewn into his tunic, she knows this) — why does Henry seem blind to that ring now? 

Richard she understands. His reluctance and his acceptance both. 

Richard, she always understood. 

For Kate remembers her naming. 

Kate remembers Anne. 

Kate remembers the day she became who she is.

And Kate is very, very afraid.

Because her Harry's fierce eyes are no longer bent upon her, but on the Lord who is now not even given the title of the baser degree of Aumerle.

And so she is afraid, more than anything she is afraid, that the Aumerle who was once a King's most trusted Lord, and is now only Rutland, disgraced and unwanted; it is only her cousin Edward who might be the source of his set-and-self-needed apology.

She thinks, now, that even her cousin's undaunted Queen Anne might have been afraid of the things unknown that are being brought unto them to bear, and so will come.

The war she sees coming is one born of hatred.

The war she sees coming is not of her begetting, nor of Harry's. She is not sure of why she feels the sudden fragility of purpose; but she is very much trembling on some glass-brittle fragment before it topples, and shatters.

Kate is starting to believe that the blow which will grind the already-splintered rainbow-shards of Henry Bolingbroke's conviction into dust will belong to the voice she once heard cry out against a lord so much greater than himself; it will belong to a cousin of hers who is at this moment nothing more than a blank space and a void in the machinations of Crown and politics.

_Good Christ, Northumberland —!_

Harry has gone to find her cousin.

But Harry has never cared for who the owner of visible power might be, and _cousin_ , to him, means no more than fact.

Which means —

Which must mean —

It means Harry has gone to find Edward of York.

And that means Harry has not gone to apologise at all.

He has gone to make a true ruin out of a false peace.

And Kate, savage and unforgiving, rejoices.

**


	5. and the heart cries, 'No!'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Foolish and loving and oh, Plantagenets.

It is, perhaps, unfortunate that Harry Percy is familiar with Plantagenet rage.

He has not been trying to find Edward of Norwich and York and now, unhappily, Rutland. He has instead been _looking out_ for him, and simmering his own doubts into a broth of unholy Greek-fire until he is sure — sure — he can create an explosion; until he is sure he can use the Lord Edward for his needs, until he is sure —

Well.

Until he is sure. 

There are reasons he has been avoiding his Lady Kate.

He has not, unfortunately, been able to avoid his brother-in-Christ.

And there is something which that same unfortunate brother has decided should be imperative that has set tinder to his own flame, and he is not sure he will be able to control.

"You — my God. My God, Gloria, you idiot born, you —"

Gloria. Named for a joke, _sic transit gloria mundi_ , he had told Kate, delightedly, when she called her brother "Mund," and they had all laughed, but it was no longer a jesting favouritism. "My God. He's evaded us all for weeks and you never told me that he came to seek me?"

"Seek? Harry, betraying your origins again, you — _Christi_ , man, all he does is betray, would you —"

Harry, who loathes all that is even a thought which glances on a lie, snarls at Mortimer, and turns his back. "I think he betrays as asked," he manages through a closed throat, and goes to find Edward of whatever Henry Bolingbroke, who can never be his king, has deemed him unworthy lord of now; goes to find the man who is Kate's cousin, and the Lord Edward, and worth a hundred of little prattling tongues, and to make all clear, if never right.

He goes to say, as he promised his Lady Kate he would do, that he is sorry.

Dear God, he is sorry.

Henry Bolingbroke will call their king into Westminster's Hall in three days' time (and did he time it to the cock's crowing, Harry wonders?) and oh, Christ in Heaven, the Lord Edward has evaded everyone to such skill that he will only come there because it is demanded of him; and he will not know why.

Harry Percy spits on the stones, as he always has when his breath tastes foul to him, and is surprised it is not red.

After all, it was at Flint. It had been red on the stones at Flint. 

The Lord Edward, dark and standing tall; tall while small-stock-made, and his eyes dark-drowned — Christ. Christ. 

The _dies irae_ of hatred for what has been done, and desire for what might be, and love of the man who encompasses all in one heart at least, and —

Oh, Christ, Harry knows that look.

It had been waiting for him when he was returned from Scotland, and Kate took him to her bed.

It is love, and it is love, and it is love, and it will win wars.

Edward who is Aumerle no more will burn down a world for his love, and care nothing for any kingdom.

Edward, the Lord Edward, Plantagenet Edward.

Oh, Harry knows him all too well.

And so he goes into the corridors of Westminster, to find a man he knows so well, and yet does not know at all.

For all that man has done is mock his inadequacies.

**

Edward isn't looking where he's going. He stopped in Wales, and hasn't had the energy to start again. So walking into someone is not exactly a surprise, because he's been doing that a lot, recently. They don't generally fall over, though.

Or pull him with them.

Or then say, sounding worried, "Sorry, are you all right?"

Which, since he isn't, is the most difficult question he seems to have ever been asked.

Long arms aren't letting him go, and a worried, sedge-burry voice repeats "Lord Edward, are you _all right?_ "

Edward has a thousand words to hand. He could use them against this man like tiny, stinging darts. And then he looks at him, and realises it's the Hotspur: the Hotspur with blue shadows under his eyes and looking as bad as Edward feels, and instead of cutting him down with skin-flaying syllables, he chokes out "Oh God no. Oh God, no. No, no, I am not, I'm not, I'm not."

"Nor I," the Hotspur says, too serious. "After Flint . I. I. I think—"

Edward hits him. He doesn't even think, simply _hits_ , because no-one has the right to talk about Flint, and that the Hotspur _dares_ —

He hits that blue-shadowed face, again and again and again, and only realises he is crying when he is forcibly stopped, and somehow they are both on their feet, and the Hotspur is holding him, holding him _hard_ , and saying — "Me too, me too."

He is Edward's enemy, and he is the only person living who's made sense in the last few days, and he is, damn him, not letting go, and Edward _needs_ someone to not let go, and so he simply lets the Hotspur hold onto him, and he lets himself quietly crumple into a broad shoulder, and he is being touched, and held, and a large hand is at the nape of his neck, cradling his head, and Harry Percy keeps saying, a little raggedly. "And I, and I… me too. God. I have been looking for you. Been seeking you. God. You disappeared, I couldn't —"

"They wanted, everyone seemed, I couldn't —" He wants to hit something again. Oh God. Oh God, Iscariot, traitor, deserter. 

_Live for me, Edward._

Murderer.

"They — they —"

"Henry Bolingbroke will order a deposition for our former King the day after tomorrow," the Hotspur says; and he is quietly, properly courteous. "And you will attend."

And for the first time, there is, somehow, a voice that can sever all Edward's control, and he tears himself away from the safety of the Hotspur's grip, and he screams to the vaulted ceiling all of the wordless injustice that he has felt over day after day after day; he screams out all his damnation to a hidden sky; and before he can go to his knees and pray that a God he is not sure he believes in may strike him down for the Judas he is, there are two hands holding him upright and a voice saying —

" _I know._ "

Edward flashes out his hand, this time to the side, and toward a killing blow that he knows will never meet a seemingly-open throat. It will never meet that tanned skin, because he will die before his blow can even slice through the thin and softened air. This movement is his death, because this is the man who wins battles, the man who survived Scotland and chains — the man who will kill him for this, his one gesture of truth, this gesture of futile rage—

_O God, o God, let him kill me, let this end —_

and this is the man who catches his wrist and looks him in the eye and says, the court-perfect tones Edward knows now must be false blurring back into coast and gorse; blurring back into the softness of sedge and sea and the bitterness of a sharp-spring wind — 

"I know that ye blame me, and so you should. Hate me as y'will. But. But. I have to ask y'this, bonnie lad." The Hotspur swallows, sharp and audible and rasping, but his voice is smooth and court-pitched once more when he asks — "My Lord Edward, would you believe me if I told you there is a way to survive beyond the day after tomorrow?"

Edward looks at the thin, bony, broken face; at the exhaustion that matches his own, at the guilt in the dark eyes —

He looks at hope.

"I think," he says, amazing himself, "that I might."


	6. in a natural cause

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry has an idea. Kate knows what it is.

Mortimer, unceasingly unhelpful, says as Harry brings a somewhat worryingly unresponsive Edward into their apartments, 

"Oh, you found the traitor, then?"

Harry turns on him, angry as he rarely is with the man he has loved since they were children and fighting all they could not understand, pushes Edward into the nearest chair, and says with all the quiet court-learned danger of that same perilous childhood, 

"Gloria, I told you to shut up, and in case it was unclear, I’ll say it once more and no more. Shut your mouth before you think of calling this man a traitor again, or before God I’ll make you. So shut. Your. Mouth."

There is real violence in the air, suddenly, Harry ungiving in his determination, Mortimer unwavering in his certainty, and they have always filled these roles since their childhood, know them to be secure; but for Harry this, this, this is the first time he has ever asked for and needed more, and he is adrift.

"Harry!" Mortimer shouts, and means it, Harry can tell he means it, "what in God's name made you — made you tell the man who’s helped depose our King anything, made you —"

"No," Edward whispers. "No, no, he said it must happen, I promised, I — it should not, it —"

" _Damn_ it!" Harry half-snaps at him, and then, trying to gentle his voice, "for once, just listen. Probably not to Mortimer. Um. Probably not to me, either. Just. To — to what I have to say. Please. He's an idiot. I have been an idiot. I was. At Flint. Please. I didn't know. Please. I'm sorry. I came to find you because I'm sorry. Please. Just — hear us out. I know you're nothing like a —" He swallows, the word too close to what he suspects he is himself for comfort, and shrugs his shoulders, uncomfortable in his clothes and skin. "You're not," he repeats.

"He's a damned traitor and I'll —"

"Mortimer, _shut up!_ "

"I'll shut up when you play the fool to this Bolingbroke-lackey no more —"

"And _that_ ," Edward says, rising from his chair with a coiled danger surely even Mortimer can recognise, "That, at least. I am not. I am not."

"You are a traitor born, and you'll die with your —"

Harry's sword is out of his permitted leather tie before he can think, and he is pointing it at his brother in Christ. "I said to shut your mouth before I shut it for you, would you like me to prove myself again, or have we played that game enough?"

"Harry! God's sake! You can't trust —"

Mortimer, lost for words that don't include his imminent death.

Mortimer. Mortimer, Kate’s Edmund, his jesting Gloria, his brother, and Harry should be trusting his instincts, but —

— but God, God, the man had not been there in the stairwell, he had not been there to hear Edward of York scream out anguish to the heavens; while only a pair of hands, _Harry's_ hands, kept him from falling to the stone steps, and he does not _understand!_

"Damn it, Edmund, you don't _know_ —" Harry begins, and has no idea how to continue, and then Kate, who always knows when she is most needed, arrives, and silences them all. Not with words or her beauty or with the respect due to her, but with all the the things that Harry loves most in her, instead.

Kate, merciful and avenging Kate, crashes in through their doors, slaps her brother across the face with the back of a small hard hand, punches Harry in his already-bruised mouth (the Lord Edward, admittedly, hits somewhat hard when angry), waits in the horrified silence until she is quite sure he is bleeding again, and then kisses him with the same ungloved ferocity. "You _idiot_ ," she snaps. "Did you think I wouldn’t know which cousin you meant?"

Harry licks the blood off his teeth, lowers his sword, and grins down at her. "No. Not for a second. But I needed you to think I could be stupid enough to be trying it on Henry. Worked. Didn’t it?"

"Yes," Kate says irritably, "because you are that damn stupid — Jesus and the saints, Harry, of course you’re that stupid, you’re —" Her eyes narrow. "Christ on the Cross. Harry. Tell me you're not that stupid."

Harry grins wider. "Oh yes," he says softly. "Oh, yes, my love, I am. But what did you expect, for an atonement?"

Edward, who has, probably to try not to be hit by Kate in the general melee of her arrival, sat back down, stirs in the chair. "Wait," he says slowly. He sounds almost drugged, and Kate looks over at Harry with her eyes wide and alarmed and unconcealed in their emotions, and Harry shakes his head, stalling her, stopping her, waiting for the inevitable. "Wait," he says again. "You said there was a way —"

Harry bows his head, because this, this, _this_ is the hardest part of what he has been planning. "Oh aye. There’s a way. It’s the only one I’ve thought of." He crouches down in front of Edward, takes his cold hands, and says in the court-tones he now knows Edward will recognise as false —- "And so you know what must be done."

Edward swallows, nods, and says wearily, "The King must be deposed." He sounds as though he is quoting. Harry doesn't want to consider what it must be.

Harry nods, slowly, not breaking eye-contact between himself and the cousin who has always seemed to despise him. "And chained. And hated. And we must be trusted. And hated. And used. And then —"

"There will be a day after tomorrow," Edward says, and smiles, even while thin, exhausted tears spill out of his eyes. "And then —"

"Harry, you’re promising —" Mortimer sounds choked. 

"I know full well what I’m promising, damn you!" It’s Harry’s war-voice that he brings to life at that, the one no-one in the field dares to disobey, the only one he can never mask. "Christ God, man, do y’not _know_? Y’care, says you, y’care, but —"

"I know," Kate says, cool as frost, and her hand is strong and small and tight-metal when it takes his left one from where it is still holding Edward's; and it is warm when it folds into his, and he takes one small, sharp shuddering breath of sanity, and closes his fingers around hers. _My Lady Kate,_ he thinks, and loves her. " _I_ know." She smiles at Edward. "Harry promised, you see." Her smile twists down. "He doesn’t break promises. Just chains."

"Oh, love, I’ll break chains and locks," Harry says, and looks at her instead of Edward. Her smile is all the glory of the mornings, in return. It is the victory that should be theirs, and the defeat that might be. She is his Lady Kate, and he would do more than break chains, only to see that smile. "You know full well that I’ll break them," he whispers, a promise that is for her, even though others might hear it, and " _I know,_ " Kate mouths to him, and Harry breathes deep, and begins what must be done.

"I'll break locks," he says again, holding one hand of Edward's, ice-cold, and keeping the other folded around Kate's small warm fingers, "That, I shall. But first?" He stands, and lets go of their hands, and looks on them all, even fuming Mortimer by the table. "I’m going to be the locksmith. And you will all help me to do it."

**


End file.
